4 Billion CEVA-powered chips and counting

I cannot wrap my brain around the concept of a billion of anything. I know what it means numerically speaking, of course, but I cannot really visualize it is real-world terms. Not that this bothers the folks at CEVA, who are currently bouncing off the walls with excitement because they have reached a number of key milestones in relation to customer shipments and technology adoption.

CEVA DSPs have now powered audio/voice in more than 2 billion devices, including many of the world’s leading smartphone, gaming console, set-top-box, DTV and home audio devices.

CEVA has now achieved more than 20 customer design wins for its LTE/LTE-Advanced DSP technologies, reaffirming the company’s dominant position as the #1 DSP licensor for wireless baseband. CEVA’s publicly announced customer wins for LTE/LTE-Advanced include Broadcom, Intel, Mindspeed and Samsung, in addition to a number of unannounced tier 1 handset and infrastructure OEMs.

According to Stuart Robinson, Director of the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies service, “Based on our analysis, LTE basebands powered by CEVA DSP cores are now shipping in the millions, second to Qualcomm. These shipments are expected to further accelerate as new CEVA-based LTE smartphones are being rolled out by tier 1 OEMs.”

Will Strauss, President of Forward Concepts, commented: “I congratulate CEVA for its monumental achievement of reaching 4 billion CEVA-powered chips shipped. It affirms CEVA’s clear market share lead in DSP IP and is a testament to its dedicated customer base. In recent years, CEVA has re-defined the classical DSP architecture by introducing special purpose DSPs such as the CEVA-XC that enable software-based modems and a unified platform for LTE, LTE-Advanced 802.11ac and 3G, with power and die size metrics on a par with fixed function modem designs. This new era in DSP technology along with strong customer traction for its LTE DSPs ideally positions CEVA to further expand their leadership in DSP IP as we enter a new era of wireless communications.”

Gideon Wertheizer, CEO of CEVA commented: “The outstanding milestone of 4 billion shipments of CEVA-powered products is a result of tectonic changes in the DSP industry, which has seen the incumbent DSP suppliers and their OEM customers transition towards adopting CEVA DSPs over proprietary DSPs. The barriers to entry for developing a DSP architecture and gaining market acceptance are substantial. For next-generation products requiring even more DSP horsepower - fixed function DSPs or DSP-configured CPUs are unable to match the flexibility, performance, power and die size of our new DSP offerings for baseband (CEVA-XC), audio/voice (CEVA-TeakLite-4) and imaging /vision (CEVA-MM3000).”

Recently published industry data by The Linley Group revealed that CEVA continued to dominate the DSP IP shipments market in 2011, with shipments of CEVA-powered DSP chips surpassing that of any other DSP IP licensing company by more than a factor of 3x.

CEVA's industry-leading DSP cores and platforms power many of the world's leading semiconductor companies and OEMs, enabling unrivaled power consumption, performance and cost efficiencies for a wide range of end markets. The CEVA-TeakLite DSP family is the most successful licensable DSP family in the history of the semiconductor industry, with more than 3 billion chips shipped, over 100 design wins, 30 active ecosystem partners and more than 100 audio and voice codecs and software applications available.

The CEVA-XC family of DSPs is designed specifically to overcome the stringent power consumption, time-to-market and cost constraints associated with developing high-performance multimode baseband solutions. It supports multiple air interfaces for various applications such multimode cellular baseband (2G/3G/4G), connectivity (WiFi 802.11ac, GNSS), digital broadcast (DVB-T2, DVB-S2, ATSC) and smart grid.

For imaging and vision applications, the CEVA-MM3101 is a unique, fully programmable platform that is dedicated to addressing the extreme computational needs of any image enhancement or vision use case. By off-loading the device’s main CPU and replacing multiple hardwired accelerators for performance-intensive imaging and vision processing tasks, the highly-efficient CEVA-MM3101 dramatically reduces the power consumption of the overall system, while providing complete flexibility in terms of standards, imaging functions, and vision applications.

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